29.06.2010

[Note: Source: title from an old LP by Jim Capaldi; video found at Peter Gratton's Philosophy in a Time of Error, 29 Jun 010. Gratton writes: "Are you feeling in too good of a mood? A bit self-satisfied? Well, here’s another dismal video from the BP spill. Here you get to see dolphins and a sperm whale struggling (at 6:30 or so) in the oil."]

Washington - The Supreme Court held
Monday that Americans have the right to own a gun for self-defense
anywhere they live, expanding the conservative court's embrace of gun
rights since John Roberts became Chief Justice.

...

Gun rights proponents almost immediately filed a
federal lawsuit challenging gun control laws in Chicago and its suburb of Oak Park, Ill., where handguns have
been banned for nearly 30 years. The Brady Center to Prevent Gun
Violence says those laws appear to be the last two remaining outright
bans.

27.06.2010

There’s no better persuasion tool than an invisible pain ray that makes people feel like OK, OK, I mean Americans zapping Afghans until they feel roasted alive, I mean

the researchers used decellularized lung scaffolds and grew new lungs while the scaffolds were inside a bioreactor

and after 8 days Google understood me, I mean picture Lady Gaga riding onstage on the back of an elephant that’s entirely covered in human skin, and on the elephant's forehead a forehead jewel, the old skinned man’s still-recognizable face.

The U.S. mission in Afghanistan centers around swaying locals to its
side. And there’s no better persuasion tool than an invisible pain ray
that makes people feel like they’re on fire.

OK, OK. Maybe that isn’t precisely the logic being employed
by those segments of the American military who would like to deploy the Active Denial System to Afghanistan. I’m sure they’re telling themselves
that the generally non-lethal microwave weapon is a better, safer crowd
control alternative than an M-16. But those ray-gun advocates better
think long and hard about the Taliban’s propaganda bonanza when news
leaks of the Americans zapping Afghans until they feel roasted alive.

Because, apparently, the Active Denial System is “in Afghanistan for testing.”

An Air Force military officer and a civilian employee at the Air
Force Research Laboratory are just two of the people telling Danger Room
co-founder and AOL News ace Sharon Weinberger that the vehicle-mounted “block 2” version of the pain ray is in the
warzone, but hasn’t been used in combat.

[Update: “We are currently not testing the Active
Denial System in Afghanistan,” Kelley Hughes, spokesperson for the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate,
tells Danger Room.

So I ask her: Has it been tested previously? She hems and haws. “I'm
not gonna get into operational,” Hughes answers.

Hughes also disputes the assertion that Active Denial creates a
burning feeling. “It's an intolerable heating sensation,” she says. “Like opening up an oven door.”]

For years, the military insisted that
the Active Denial System — known as the “Holy Grail” of crowd control — was oh-so-close to battlefield deployment.
But a host of technical issues hampered the ray gun: everything from overheating to poor performance in the rain. Safety concerns lingered; a test
subject had to be airlifted to a burn center after being zapped by the weapon. (He eventually made a full recovery.) And then there were
concerns about “the atmospherics” — how the locals might react— when they learned that the United States had
turned a people-roaster on ‘em. “Not politically tenable,” the Defense Science Board concluded.

I pinged Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s staff about the use of Active
Denial in Afghanistan. I’ll let you know if I hear anything back. But a
few months ago, a source told me that a representative from the Joint
Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate was in Afghanistan. Did that mean Active
Denial was about to be put into action? Nope, the source said. “She’s
just out getting some atmospherics on the use of non-lethals.”
Update 2: “The active denial system is in the country,” e-mails
Lt. Col. John Dorrian, a spokesman for Gen. McChrystal. “However, it
has not been used operationally and no decision has been made at this
time to deploy it.”

Photo: JNLWD

[Note: Source: Noah Schactman, “U.S. Testing Pain Ray in Afghanistan (Updated Again)”, at
Wired.com, 19 Jun 010; this has been one wild day for learning about crazy. Maybe it's just me but wouldn't a better form of crowd control be the unimaginable act of actually bringing economic and all other forms of justice, rights etc into being? Ah, what am I talking about? Human popcorn, anybody?]

In a first for medical science, rats were
able to breathe and oxygenate their blood using lungs that had been
grown in the lab. This a major step toward being able to grow
replacement organs.

Led by biomedical engineer Laura Niklason, a team at Yale constructed
the tiny lungs for rats using a relatively new process called
"decellularization." By rinsing organs in detergent, all the cellular
material is washed away, leaving behind a fibrous, white structure that
can be used as a scaffold to build organs out of fetal cells. The
researchers used decellularized lung scaffolds, and grew new lungs with
"a mixture" of fetal rat cells which formed tissues and blood vessels
while the scaffolds were inside a bioreactor. The bioreactor - much like
the organism-growing "vats" from many science fiction stories - was
filled with circulating fluid, to emulate a fetal environment. And after
8 days, the scientists had fully-functioning lungs that could inflate
and fill with blood just like naturally-grown lungs.

Next, they decided to test the lungs on rats. ScienceNOW reports:

To determine whether the new organs worked, the researchers removed
rats' left lungs and stitched in lab-grown replacements. X-rays showed
that the implanted lungs were inflating, though not fully. Tests of gas
levels in blood flowing to and from the replacement organs showed that
they were taking in oxygen and releasing carbon dioxide at 95% of normal
efficiency. The researchers allowed the animals to breathe with the
lungs for up to 2 hours before euthanizing them because of blood clots.

"We've shown that it's possible to engineer a lung that can perform
the single most important function-exchange of gases," says Niklason,
whose team reports its findings online today in Science. She describes
the results as one advance in a "20- to 25-year project" and cautions
that a huge obstacle lies ahead. Researchers need to identify
cells-possibly adult stem cells from the patient-that can reconstruct
lung tissue without provoking attack by the immune system, the problem
that plagues current transplant recipients.

Other researchers have suggested one of the problems was that the
lungs were immature, and that perhaps they should have been kept in the
bioreactor for a couple of months before implantation.

We may be two decades away from growing functional, replacement lungs
for humans, but this experiment was an incredible proof-of-concept. We
are another step closer to off-the-shelf body parts.

[Source: Annalee Newitz, "Breakthrough: the first functional, vat-grown lungs", at io9, 27 Jun 010; via Science
NOW; Photograph by Scott Barbour/Getty Images. I think of Gertrude Stein writing early in The Geographical History of America: "If nobody had to die how would there be room for any of us who now live to have lived ... Now the relation of the human mind to human nature is this. Human nature does not know this. Human nature cannot know this." Repeat]